"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"for 12 February 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Putting the Ass Back in Assassin

The Devil You Know

It seems that none of the
bright boys in the technology
press caught the implicit
doublethink of "Microsoft
doesn't get the Web" and
"Microsoft is going to take over
the Web."
Five years ago today in Suck.

Years from now, you will almost certainly not remember where you were
the morning of February 7, 2001, when Robert Pickett, a 47-year-old tax
accountant from Evansville, Indiana, broke onto the White House grounds
brandishing a gun, fired some errant shots in the general direction of
the residence, threatened to take his own life and was brought down by
Secret Service agents, who, in the final insult, were evidently not
even
shooting to kill.

People tend to talk about presidential assassination as if it's a bad
thing. But it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that an
assassination attempt is a perverse sign of legitimacy; it is the
strongest sign possible that someone in the electorate still cares.
Jimmy Carter and George Bush the First must take major razzing at those
ex-president photo ops because they never made their bones.
Still, the presidency gets the assassins it deserves, and Dubya is just
the latest in a line of recent chief execs whom history has chosen to
salute with a pop gun. (You may be wondering why Pickett even qualifies
as an assassin. We'll get to that.)

Say what you will about American assassins of the past: they were at
least generally capable of hitting a large building painted bright
white
at relatively close range. Martin Amis posited the Theory of Increasing
Humiliation  that as civilization wears on, people choose more humble
and risible figures for leaders and heroes  and the theory, it turns
out, also appears to apply to the people who would whack those leaders and
heroes:
we've gone from Brutus to Butt-Head.

There used to be certain things you could assume about presidential
assassins, successful or not.
For starters, that they intended to kill the president. Or that they
did
so for a discernable reason that had something to do with their
target's
job  if not a political agenda, at least a vendetta.
Hollywood still can't get its mind around the new, apolitical, murkily
motivated assassin. In the Line of Fire had a superassassin named for
John Wilkes Booth; The West Wing writer-creator Aaron Sorkin, perhaps
the last remaining adherent to the great-man theory of the presidency,
gave us a coordinated 21-gun salute by a troop of white supremacists.

In fact it's been decades since we've seen this kind of American
assassin anywhere but on a screen. The last of the great ideological
assailants was not Lee Harvey Oswald  for our purposes, we're
assuming he did it  but the undersung Sara Jane Moore, a San Francisco
radical with ties to the Symbionese Liberation Army, who flubbed a shot
at Gerald
Ford in Union Square and said, "I did it to create chaos." (Last
year, the septuagenarian prison activist won a lawsuit
allowing women prisoners in her Alameda County facility to have keys to
lock themselves into their own cells at night.)

Moore was the last 20th-century presidential assailant to act for
clearly political reasons, in the tradition of the anarchist
McKinleycide Leon
Czolgosz or Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, the Puerto Rican
separatists who forced their way into Harry Truman's temporary residence
at Blair House but were stopped in a three-minute, 27-shot
gun battle. Oswald may have been
political, after all, but his motives died with him; and while Squeaky
Fromme, who took a similarly botched shot at Ford a few days before
Moore, was a member of the Manson Family, she was clearly not the
sharpest tool on the Spahn Ranch (there were no bullets in the firing
chamber when she pulled the trigger).

Since Moore, assassinations have become narcissistic, even
self-immolating acts that resemble performance art more than
revolutionary statements. During Bill Clinton's first term, scaling the
White House fence became a bigger Washington tourist attraction than
the
Smithsonian IMAX. In October 1994, a man fired 15 semiautomatic rounds
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from the street; a month earlier, a
coke-and-booze-addled pilot tried to crash a Cessna into the White
House. Neither assailant appeared to have even had the courtesy to be
politically motivated.

To assassinate a head of state for political ends, after all, requires
a
rather quaint faith in the office, an old-fashioned belief in a
rational
and ordered political system in which the snake actually has a
functional head that can be effectively cut off. Outside Iraq and the
Congo, this is an increasingly untenable postion. Your contemporary
extremist  to say nothing of business leaders and voters  tends to
see power as not even a hydra but an amoeba, and the president as just
another jelly-filled pseudopod.

Thus the half-assed, insulting attacks against Clinton: abstract,
desultory attempts not even against the man himself but against his
house. (In this sense, West Wing auteur
Sorkin got at least one thing right: His shooters
were trying to kill not the president but the black aide dating his
daughter.) If you think the Federal Reserve and/or the Jews in
Hollywood
call the shots anyway, why waste your ammo on Dubya? Today, you send
your message elsewhere, by USPS or Ryder.
If Leon Czolgosz were around today, would he go to Buffalo
or Davos?

So the burden of keeping Secret Service agents on their toes falls to a
different breed of scourge. And the salient difference is not so much
that they're nuts but that they're egotistical. Some shmendrick takes a
shot at one actor to impress another.
Another steals a plane to go out in a blaze of glory in the president's
living room. The president, even the presidency, is beside the point in
their own private psychodramas. Sic semper tyrannis, my ass:
To
today's assassin, it's all about me, me, me.

Assassins follow trends like the arts do. Oswald bridged modernism and
postmodernism like early Pynchon (or DeLillo, who wrote
the book on him): postmodernist because of the murky web of
conspiracy theories that survived
him, modernist because he worked in the context of big all-explaining
worldviews. Czolgosz was straight-up social realist; Booth was as
histrionic and big-R Romantic as Richard Wagner. And lately,
assassination attempts have been a regular Whitney Biennial, full of
personal angst and self-promotion, bizarre, symbolic stunts that call
into question the definition of the phrase "assassination attempt."

Pickett's Charge was, you might say, the ultimate assassination attempt
for a confessional, postideological and PR-focused era. A distraught
man
decides to make a showy mess on the White House lawn. Maybe he means to
shoot the president, maybe not. Like as not, he's winging it. But by
choosing the White House as his stage, he is, as near as we can tell,
trying to hit Bush where it hurts most. Right in his image.